Michigan Democrats figured they found their next Senate star.
The polls keep backing them up, and the national press keeps nodding right along.
But one New York Times reporter just spotted a crack in those numbers that nobody in the party wants to talk about.
Lifelong Democrats Are Doing Something They Never Did Before
Jeremy Peters covers national politics for The New York Times, and he showed up on MS NOW’s Morning Joe with a warning that should send every Democrat operative in Lansing reaching for the antacid.
Peters thinks the polls could be painting Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee for US Senate in Michigan, in a rosier light than he deserves heading into Election Day.
The reason? A group of voters the surveys may not catch. And they aren’t Republicans.
They’re Democrats. Many of them Jewish, many of them living in the Detroit suburbs, and plenty of them planning to vote for former US Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI).
“One of the factors that is really worth paying closer attention to are the number of Democrats, lifelong Jewish Democrats, especially in the Detroit suburbs, who are saying for the first time in their lives they’re voting Republican,” Peters said. “That’s a big deal.”
But Peters didn’t leave it there.
“I don’t know of any other marquee race in the country where the Republican candidate is converting Democrats,” he added.
Peters ran through the national headwinds he sees for President Trump, from prices to gas to the war. Even with all of that baked in, he called the crossover vote “very unusual, and really quite striking that there are Democrats who are so concerned about their party’s nominee that they are willing to vote for the candidate aligned with Donald Trump.”
Think about that for a second. A reporter from the newspaper American liberals treat as gospel went on cable television and conceded that loyal Democrats in a Blue Wall state would rather side with a Trump-aligned Republican than with their own party’s pick.
El-Sayed Spent Months Lighting This Fire Himself
None of this came out of nowhere.
Lansing Mayor Andy Schor, a Jewish Democrat, said a few weeks before Peters’ appearance that he can’t vote for El-Sayed. Schor said the candidate’s attacks on Israel leave him too “uncomfortable” to back him.
And Schor had plenty of material to work with. El-Sayed has said Israel is just as “evil” as Hamas. He has repeatedly accused the country of committing a “genocide” in Gaza, a charge the Israeli government rejects. He also blasted AIPAC’s donations to his primary opponent, US Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI), as “legalized bribery.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) took a bumpier road. Nessel had publicly knocked El-Sayed for making Israel the “central villain” of his public complaints.
She said she “couldn’t consider” voting for a Republican. But before endorsing him, she put one blunt question to El-Sayed: did Jewish Zionists “belong” in the Democrat Party?
His answer took the scenic route. “So look, I believe in a big tent, and there are Democrats who are going to believe different things about different issues, Israel being one of them,” El-Sayed said. He promised a tent “where we march in lockstep on the 95% of things we agree on,” and eventually landed on “So, yes.”
Nessel endorsed him a few minutes later.
But the state’s top law enforcement officer felt she had to ask her own party’s Senate nominee whether people like her still have a home in that party. The question alone tells voters plenty.
The Polling Industry Has Missed This Kind of Voter Before
On paper, El-Sayed looks fine. A YouGov poll of likely voters had him ahead of Rogers 49% to 48%. A Quantus survey put it at 48% to 47%. A CBS Detroit/Mitchell Research poll gave him a 46% to 41% edge, and a Public First Action/Guidant poll showed him up 48% to 43%.
Most of the polls the Times tracks show El-Sayed ahead by somewhere between one and four points.
Peters suspects those numbers lean too heavily on college-educated voters. He also passed along something he keeps hearing from people on the ground: folks don’t want to tell a stranger on the phone that they plan to vote Republican for the first time in their lives.
Anybody who followed Michigan in 2016 and 2020 knows how that story can end. Polls in both cycles underestimated Donald Trump’s support in the state, and in 2016 he carried Michigan after nearly every major survey had him trailing.
And the race looked very different over the summer. A poll commissioned by the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, and Business Leaders for Michigan found Rogers leading El-Sayed 48% to 41% among voters who said they would definitely show up in the general election. Independents in that survey preferred Rogers 47% to 19%.
Polls move, of course. Maybe El-Sayed really did close that gap. Or maybe a chunk of the gap just stopped answering the phone.
Democrats Keep Testing How Much Their Own Voters Will Swallow
Here’s where the Michigan race stops being just a Michigan story.
The Democrat Party has spent decades treating certain voting blocs like permanent property. Suburban Jewish voters around Detroit sat near the top of that list, the kind of dependable Democrats nobody in party headquarters ever lost sleep over.
The party assumed it could nominate whoever the activist wing wanted, and the faithful would fall in line once the ballots came out.
But the left-wing base in Michigan picked a nominee whose rhetoric on Israel pushed his own state’s Attorney General to demand reassurances before she’d endorse him. Party leaders then expected the rest of the coalition to shrug it off and move along.
According to Peters, some of them won’t.
There’s a bigger pattern at work, too. Democrat leaders love to say their party speaks for ordinary working people. What the media likes to call progressive populism keeps turning out to mean activist priorities that the party’s own longtime voters never signed up for and don’t much care for.
And when those voters push back, the response usually amounts to some version of “big tent,” followed by a lecture about who the real problem is.
A Republican hasn’t won a Michigan Senate seat in more than three decades. Democrats have leaned on that streak like a pension check that always clears.
If Peters has it right, the final count could look noticeably different from the polling averages. If he has it wrong, Democrats still have to live with the awkward fact that the mayor of the state capital and the state’s top lawyer both felt the need to say something about their own nominee out loud.
Either way, nobody in the party gets to claim they didn’t see the warning signs.
Sources: Mediaite, “‘A Big Deal!’ NYT Reporter Warns Polling May Not Be Picking Up Democrats Voting Against El-Sayed”; Political Wire, Michigan Senate poll reports (YouGov, Quantus, CBS Detroit/Mitchell Research, Public First Action/Guidant); Jewish Insider, “New Michigan Senate poll shows El-Sayed at disadvantage against Republican challenger”; The Daily Caller, “Michigan Senate Race Could Be GOP’s Best Midterms Offense Play, Poll Shows”